Getty Museum
Codornices Park, Euclid Street, Berkeley
Creator
Dorothea LangeAmerican Photographer · 1895–1965
All works by this person →Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, to first-generation German Americans, Dorothea Lange was stricken at age seven with polio, which left her right leg and foot disfigured. Her father abandoned the family when she was twelve. After high school, she apprenticed with portrait photographer Arnold Genthe in Manhattan and studied with Clarence H. White at Columbia University’s Teacher’s Coll
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1955–1960
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- 3b25a76d-657e-4d53-9172-1d5e2d2136f0
> Berkeley in the late 1950s was, as it had been for the more than fifteen years that Dorothea Lange had lived there, a quiet, secure, prosperous town. She sometimes photographed her neighbors on its residential streets, taking a somewhat different approach than the one she used in recording the pedestrians, particularly the women shoppers, in downtown San Francisco or Oakland ([2000.50.21](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128412), [2000.50.20](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128411)). The pictures she took close to home include this simple composition, a small representation of a charming scene. The woman, in her plain scarf, dark sweater, and housedress, seems the stereotype of a conscientious young mother. The little girl follows behind, literally walking in her mother's shadow. This pair, observed by Lange crossing the playground in the park behind her house, may have caused her to reflect on her own experience of accompanying her mother on the daily ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan. Their trek, however, was not an idyllic trot through a sheltered, well-kept park. Lange and her mother had to part ways once in the city; each had to walk alone to reach the respective destinations of school and work. Not only the journey, but the act of making it, were painful memories for a woman who had been afflicted with polio as a child. This 1950s family scene was not part of Lange's story, which may be why she could so easily create a fairy-tale-like composition from its sunlit reality. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 80. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.
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